NEW YORK: A basic fact of conflict is that people’s perceptions of each other matter. Viewing someone as subhuman or demonic, for example, reduces people’s inhibitions towards using violence against them. Likewise, negative images of the other escalate conflict through engendering fear, misunderstandings, blame and zero-sum thinking. Research conducted by psychologist Albert Bandura has demonstrated …
MILAN: China is entering a complex set of transitions that will lay the foundations for the advanced-country status that it hopes to reach in the next 25 years. After three decades of sustained growth and a remarkably successful policy response to the recent global crisis, Chinese self-confidence is soaring. But the lessons that the government …
CAIRO: Weddings are such happy occasions. My heart always skips a beat when I hear that a couple has decided to tie the knot, come what may. In this day and age, it’s hard to guarantee anything. As our grandmothers used to say, marriage is like a watermelon (etc.). Amid the bad news of torrential …
In his Wednesday sermon last week, a teary-eyed Pope Shenouda attempted to console the families of the Nagaa Hammadi shooting victims, whom he called martyrs. Later on, in a remark most observers missed, he compared the Nagaa Hammadi victims to Joseph, who was “conspired against and cast away from home by his brothers. Whether the …
BEER-SHEVA: In recent weeks, Israel’s citizens have been hearing about a new bone of contention in Jerusalem. Almost every Sunday, we receive reports about protests, violent clashes and even arrests in Sheikh Jarrah or in what is referred to in some of the reports as the “Simeon the Just compound. What is the capital raging …
LONDON: How real is the danger of inflation for the world economy? Opinion on this matter is divided between conservative economists and official bodies like the IMF and OECD. The IMF and OECD project very low inflation rates over the next few years. But former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warns of inflationary dangers. …
LONDON: Reading Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father, the US president’s beautifully written reflections on his early life and identity, most people are struck by his cool and intellectual approach. This is not to say that he is unemotional. Obama can rage and weep. But he rarely seems to act on the basis of raw …
RAMALLAH: Ever since the Palestinian Nakba, through decades of affliction to the present day Israeli occupation, Palestinian society more often than not didn’t know what it wanted, and when it did, it didn’t know how to achieve it. Achieving what we want will come first and foremost with self-knowledge. The problem is that who we …
CAMBRIDGE: There is now intense debate about how the pay levels of top executives compare with the compensation given to rank-and-file employees. But, while such comparisons are important, the distribution of pay among top executives also deserves close attention. In our recent research, we studied the distribution of pay among top executives in publicly traded …
NEW YORK: Usually, disclosure statements go at the end of an article, but let me start with mine. I sit on the board of Yandex, a Russian search company with a roughly 60 percent market share in Russia, compared to Google’s 20 percent or so. I am also an investor in and advisor to AnchorFree, …
LONDON: Yemen has suddenly joined Afghanistan and Pakistan as a risk to global security. Indeed, it is increasingly seen as a nascent failed state and potential replacement host for Al-Qaeda. The attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day by a young Nigerian man trained by Al-Qaeda in Yemen appeared to open the West’s …
PRAGUE: On Christmas Day last year, one of China’s best-known human rights activists, the writer and university professor Liu Xiaobo, was condemned to 11 years in prison. Liu is one of the main drafters of Charter 08, a petition inspired by Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, calling on the Chinese government to adhere to its own laws …
The disaster in Haiti shows once again something that we, as human beings, have always known: that even amid the worst devastation, there is always hope. I saw that for myself this week in Port au Prince. The UN suffered its single greatest loss in history. Our headquarters in the Haitian capital was a mass …
KIBBUTZ HANITA, Israel: “My name is Harvey, I am a journalist . The guy on the phone sounded cheerful. He had heard of our project, the Israeli-Palestinian Midwives Co-existence Group, through a mutual friend. He said that he would like to make a film about the project and asked how I felt about it. It …
COPENHAGEN: Since the Copenhagen climate summit’s failure, many politicians and pundits have pointed the finger at China’s leaders for blocking a binding, global carbon-mitigation treaty. But the Chinese government’s resistance was both understandable and inevitable. Rather than mustering indignation, decision-makers would do well to use this as a wake-up call: it is time to consider …
In the course of the past two weeks, the relationship between Egypt and the Hamas government in Gaza has deteriorated and their latent conflict has become public. The concrete reason for this state of affairs is two decisions taken by the Egyptian government. The first was a decision to build a new metal wall that …
BONN: Atop a mountain in the Syrian heartland lies a monastery where the message of Christian-Muslim unity is alive and well. Cooled by eastern-blowing winds from the mountains dividing Lebanon and Syria, Deir Mar Musa is perhaps an unlikely place to find the seed of intercultural and inter-religious understanding. Yet the monastery has been a …
FLORENCE: Severe banking crises bring painful and long-lasting disruptions. But they also lead to surprises. The lessons learned in the immediate aftermath bear little relationship to the eventual outcome. There are immediate and obvious answers to the question of who was to blame, but they rarely correspond with the new shape of the financial landscape …
No more ad hoc arrangements. This is the message Egypt is sending to Hamas and the other relevant parties by setting up a fortified barrier along Egypt s border with the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian move marks the end of an era in Egypt s policy toward Gaza and Hamas. In 2005, when Israel was …
PARIS: A referendum in Switzerland forbids the construction of new minarets. Racial violence explodes in the southern Italian region of Calabria. An intense and controversial debate takes place in France on the issue of national identity. These events have little in common, yet they all point to a growing European trend. More than ever before …
RAMALLAH: Egypt’s actions in Gaza have been a source of confusion for some time. Four factors govern Egypt’s policy towards the Gaza Strip: 1. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the upholding of which is a keypriority for Egyptian national security. 2. Concerns triggered by Israel’s desire to transfer responsibility for the Gaza Strip onto the Egyptian …
CAIRO: The dramatic, diplomatic tension that flared between Turkey and Israel last week once again brought Turkey to the forefront as the voice of the Muslim world and exposed the arrogance of the current Israeli administration. Early last week, Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, summoned Ahmet Oguz Celikkol, the Turkish ambassador, to express a …
ALGIERS: The future of Sudan hangs in the balance. National elections are due in April. A referendum on the future status of the south of the country is supposed to follow in 2011. Both were key ingredients of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended 20 years of civil war between north and south. Both …
On the eve of January 7 – Christmas eve according to the Orthodox Christian calendar – six Coptic Christians and one Muslim guard were shot dead by gunmen as they left midnight mass in Nagaa Hammadi in southern Egypt. It’s not entirely clear whether the crime was religiously-motivated. Often the motives are conflated with other …
COLOGNE, Germany: Jerusalem is a central point of reference for the three great monotheistic faiths. King David made the city the political and religious capital of Israel, creating a center for Judaism within and beyond the region. Jerusalem is a holy city for Christians as the place of Jesus of Nazareth’s teaching, crucifixion and resurrection. …
For Egyptians, there’s no place for optimistic forecasts for 2010: the start of a new year and a new decade is sadly overshadowed by a sense of stagnation and immobility. Years, decades and centuries are not just there to measure time. They are loaded with multiple meanings and feelings, fueled by historical experiences in all …
Energy lies at the heart of the world’s most pressing global challenges. Yet at both the global and national levels, energy is poorly governed. The fiasco of the Copenhagen climate summit is just one illustration of how far the world is from being able to bring about the desperately needed transition to a system of …
CAMBRIDGE: Thirty years ago, China had a tiny footprint on the global economy and little influence outside its borders, save for a few countries with which it had close political and military relationships. Today, the country is a remarkable economic power: the world’s manufacturing workshop, its foremost financier, a leading investor across the globe from …
FEZ: In recent years, Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey have trained and appointed a new group to the ranks of religious guides: women. Women religious guides, referred to as murshidat in Arabic, reach a demographic that might otherwise not be available – or receptive – to male imams, such as women and children, particularly those in …
STOCKHOLM: History often moves with small steps, but such steps sometimes turn out to have big implications. This New Year’s Eve, Sweden made history in a small way by ending the last rotating foreign and security policy presidency of the European Union. After years of rotation every six months, we handed the job over to …
